TITANE

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS, AND THAT'S NOT A CAR-BASED PUN

As extreme French arthouse cinema that mixes body horror with psychological drama, serial killings, frank sexuality and absurd (and laughless) comedy goes, Titane is, probably mercifully, a one-off. I can't imagine a Titane 2, and I can't imagine the suits at Paramount or Platinum Dunes feverishly outbidding each other for the English language remake rights. I was ambivalent about Julia Ducournau's earlier horror/art Raw and, for all the graphic violence and sundry weirdness, I'm not won over by this new one either. Yet again everyone seems to love it far more than I do: is it just me?

Titane is either a rambling story that wanders all over the place with no clear idea where it's going, or (at least) three very strange stories jostling for space in the same film. When she was a child she was severely injured in a car smash and had to have a titanium plate embedded in her skull. Now Alexia (Agatha Rousselle, astonishing) is an exotic dancer at a car-themed nightclub who finds herself inexplicably pregnant after a sexual encounter with a Cadillac. Yes, really. She is also a serial killer who goes on the run and adopts the identity of a missing teenage boy named Adrien, shaving her head and binding her body and being taken in by the boy's distraught fire chief father...

Everyone else, including proper critics and international film festivals (including Cannes, where it got the Palme D'Or!) seems to have embraced Titane as a masterpiece but I just don't get it. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned and I'd just prefer a simpler, more coherent and straightforward narrative that focussed on just one of those strands; as it is the human/mechanical sex and pregnancy that mixes Demon Seed with Cronenberg's Crash, the odd comedy angles with the fire crew and the bloodstrewn serial killer nastiness never came together for me. Maybe that says more about me than it does about the film. But I can't apologise for not responding as enthusiastically as so many others whose recommendations I can usually trust. It is interesting and odd and sometimes shocking, certainly, but I just don't get it.

**